Last week, specifically, June 5, 2008, was the 40th
anniversary of the death of Robert F. Kennedy, one of the most beloved
politicians of his era. I was surprised by the lack of commemorations
by news sources, which typically jump all over anniversaries. No doubt,
this “anniversary story” was a victim of media myopia regarding the
2008 presidential race.

One of the few retrospectives was a piece I did for National Review. This article here is largely a reprint of the National Review
piece, with an important update in the end, brought to my attention by
a reader—a Grove City College parent—who made a fascinating observation
that eluded me when I first wrote the National Review piece.

Those news sources who paused to note RFK’s
death searched for some nugget from RFK’s life or even the life of his
assassin—anything to make their story different. In that spirit, I’d
like to offer a fresh perspective that went unacknowledged in the
media, especially given that it was long ago got sucked into a
historical vacuum, and which at first glance might seem odd but is
actually interesting, notable, and perhaps even moving. It is also
worth noting at a time when politics is as divisive as ever, both among
political parties and even within them.

I’m referring to the response to the
assassination by the then-governor of the state in which RFK was shot,
and who went on to become the most beloved political figure of the era
that succeeded the Kennedys: Ronald Reagan.

The Reagan-RFK relationship has eluded
historians, biographers, and even admirers of both men. It was a
fascinating one that might be dismissed by liberals who liked RFK but
not Reagan and by conservatives who liked Reagan but not RFK—which
would be a mistake.

In fact, navigating through the earliest links
in the relationship is a wake-up call for both liberals and
conservatives: Back when Ronald Reagan was a liberal Democrat, he
campaigned for Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas, who was running for the
U.S. Senate and who had been dubbed the “Pink Lady” by her opponent,
Richard Nixon. This put Reagan not only against Nixon but against the
Kennedys, who were staunch anti-communists who crossed party lines and
loyalties to support Nixon (including no less than a campaign
contribution) against Douglas. The Kennedys were to the right of Reagan.

A decade and a half later, Reagan had moved
decidedly and permanently to the right, but once again found himself on
the other side of the Kennedys when, on May 15, 1967, a year before the
shooting in Los Angeles, he debated RFK in a major, nationally
televised debate on the Vietnam War. The debate was broadcast from
10:00-11:00 PM EST by CBS TV Network and CBS Radio Network, and was
watched by 15 million Americans, as well as covered by the leading
newsweeklies. (Someone, whether at C-SPAN or the Reagan Library or
wherever, should have the savvy to re-run the debate today; it is
captivating.)

Newsweek speculated whether
the debate might be a “dry run” for a future set of “Great Debates”
between these two promising presidential aspirants, insightfully
sensing that the two were rising to the top of their respective
parties. The verdict, from Newsweek to the San Francisco Chronicle, to historians like the late David Halberstam and Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, was that Reagan overwhelmingly won the debate.

Yet, the most intriguing (and forgotten)
component in the relationship between the pair came a year later, on
June 5, 1968. On that day, Bobby Kennedy was again an item for Reagan,
though this time in a dreadful way that the governor could not have
imagined in their debate a year earlier: Kennedy had just been
assassinated.

Reagan was immediately invited to talk about
the tragedy on the television show of his friend and fellow entertainer
Joey Bishop. A rare transcript of his appearance is today held by Bill
Clark, who, as Governor Reagan’s chief of staff, grabbed a copy and
filed it away for political posterity, where it still remains (stuffed
in a box) four decades later (Clark shared it with me).

Reagan spoke to Joey Bishop at length about
Kennedy, the loss, the “savage act,” and even offered spiritual advice
on how to cope with the sadness. “I am sure that all of us are praying
not only for him but for his family and for those others who were so
senselessly struck down also in the fusillade of bullets,” said Reagan.
“I believe we should go on praying, to the best of our ability, to ask
for God’s mercy in what has happened to us.” The governor said there
was a “pall” over his state of California.

Particularly remarkable was how the Cold
Warrior found a way to direct the discussion to what he assured the
audience was America’s real enemy: the USSR. Reagan noted that
Kennedy’s killer, a radical Arab, committed the crime because of the
senator’s support of Israel, specifically during the Six Day War that
had occurred exactly one year earlier. As Soviet sources now
confirm—and as histories and documentaries today readily
acknowledge—that conflict was intentionally precipitated by the
Kremlin, which had concocted false intelligence reports about alleged
Israeli troop movements upon Arab territory. Moscow shared the phony
information with Egypt and other Arab states for the explicit purpose
of creating a military confrontation with Israel, which the Soviets
believed would advance their broader foreign-policy interests in the
Middle East and the world, and would undermine an America struggling in
Vietnam. The Soviets stirred the pot, and their shameless maneuver led
to a war.

Reagan thus linked Bobby Kennedy’s
assassination to the USSR. “The enemy sits in Moscow,” he told Joey
Bishop. “I call him an enemy because I believe he has proven this, by
deed, in the Middle East. The actions of the enemy led to and
precipitated the tragedy of last night.”

Reagan was not finished. Later in that same
week, he connected the earlier assassination of the other Kennedy, John
F. Kennedy, to Soviet communism. In a largely unreported and unknown
speech at the Indiana State Fairgrounds in Indianapolis, on June 13,
1968—again, a complete transcript of which has been stored in Bill
Clark’s personal files for some 40 years—Reagan was eager to remind
Americans of the worldview that had motivated JFK’s murderer: “Five
years ago, a president was murdered by one who renounced his American
citizenship to embrace the godless philosophy of communism.”

Ronald Reagan had formulated a new outrage
toward Soviet communism: Moscow’s nefarious ways were leading, directly
or indirectly, to the extermination of some of America’s most cherished
political figures—the two Kennedy boys.

Here I would like to pause to address those
liberals who, as they read this, are flippantly dismissing Reagan’s
stark suspicions as paranoid right-wing anti-communism. They should
consider this: Reagan’s accusations against Moscow were not dissimilar
to those of the Kennedy boys themselves. Bobby had been so staunchly
anti-communist that he had once worked for Joe McCarthy, and even asked
McCarthy to be the godfather to his first child, Kathleen
Kennedy-Townsend.

Our histories are too often black-and-white,
and thoroughly incomplete. The relationship between Bobby Kennedy and
Ronald Reagan is an excellent example, filled with wrinkles and irony,
and essentially lost to history. It also offers an example of the grace
that Ronald Reagan showed toward his political opponents, perhaps a
lesson that conservatives should be mindful of as they assimilate the
news concerning the mortality of the latest Kennedy—Ted Kennedy.

It was 40 years ago that Ronald Reagan would
join America in prayer and mourning over the death of RFK, as a torch
was silently passed from one beloved politician to another, from an
icon of liberalism to an icon of conservatism. History would never be
the same.

And yet, history had another irony still in
store. As was noted to me by a Grove City College parent last week, it
would be another June 5—June 5, 2004—that Ronald Reagan likewise would
pass on to meet his Maker. Both Reagan and RFK share the same date of
death. That’s another of those fascinating, elusive quirks of
history—whether coincidence or Providence—that will forever connect
Ronald Reagan and Robert F. Kennedy.

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